This might be the best and most clarifying thing you’ve ever written. This subjecting the reality to the light of day- harsh or not- depends on us using our practical common sense, born of experience, to analyse events around us.
In days gone by, the conceptual field we had to work with was smaller- local, immediate, familiar. Modernity has massively opened up our horizons, and that is having the knock-on effect of exposing us to cognitive stressors that result from more uncertainty and produce the sensation of being gaslit- we can’t really get a reliable grasp on things which we can’t directly or proximately experience.
Al Assad has provided us with an example of a vaccine against this modern conceptual dis-ease: calling things as they are… and staying the course. The Syrian people have had one certainty during this period of fickle Western justification. At no point did their leader/elite seek to save their own skin, to abandon ship, to improve their own situation regardless of the suffering of the people.
The contrast with western elites is stark…and that’s only the threat of mild redistribution, nobody’s asking them to put their lives on the line!
As far as I can tell, the elites as a class learnt the wrong lesson (and chose the wrong enemy: socialism- just a political technology for blunting the edges of the divisive weapon of inequality)from their losses in WW1 (where regiments were recruited from a locality to foment loyalty; from the top to the bottom ranks, so all went together to defend their home place and all were equally destroyed in the mass machine war )- they took refuge in financial and information control and abandoned the previously recognised social-contract obligation of defenders of the nation, fellow sufferers of last resort. This fundamentally ‘new world’ attitude of comfort and expediency led to inevitable distancing from, and condescension to, their people. New money rescuing old status through matrimonial bail-out, mergers and acquisitions and then competing for the ever diminishing returns resulting in no honour remaining amongst thieves. Their success at this game has been their own worst enemy…
What, if anything, does ‘noblesse oblige’ now?
I don’t think they have a clue anymore- even less so after the financial crisis: another existential shock for the elites on a par with the ‘Great War’. They are in a quandary over whether to limit their own cognitive conceptual field by returning to protectionism (‘lord of the manor’) or carry on with the ‘there’s one country and it’s ours’ model. Hence ‘Game of Thrones’, ‘ nationalist populism’,la’Reconquista’ ‘return to religious orthodoxy’ being the zeitgeist, cos the only real ‘trickle down’ there’s ever been is cultural. And Brexit, the Schrodinger’s Cat, supposedly hedge-able, product of elite anxiety and ambivalence.
The problem for these prospective lords is we don’t like them, given what they do. They are a minority group with extreme hoarding and control needs, their triggers are not our triggers. And yet we- the tolerant, the ‘make-doers and menders’, the ‘do as you would be done to-ers’ , the ‘forgive and forget’ and ‘benefit of the doubt-ers’- are accused of all of their vices.
Syria, on the other hand, has passed through the fire for 8 years and if it survives will be a united country that knows and trusts itself.
The Syrians, they deserve a break. And our applause. Not sanctions.
